Distributed consensus on minimum time rendezvous via cyclic alternating projection

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm to solve planar minimum time multi-vehicle rendezvous problem with non-identical velocity constraints on cyclic digraph (topology). Motivated by the cyclic alternating projection method that can compute a point's projection on the intersection of some convex sets, we transform the minimum time rendezvous problem into finding the distance between the position plane and the intersection of several second-order cones in position-time space. The distance can be achieved by metric projecting onto the plane and the intersection persistently from any initial point, where the projection onto the intersection is obtained by Dykstra's alternating projection algorithm. It is shown that during the procedure, vehicles use only the information from neighbors and can apply the projection onto the plane asynchronously. Demonstrations are worked out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.